


Things That Burn

by abel_obel



Category: Call of Duty (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Drinking, Drowning, Hypothermia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Near-death Experiences, Secret Relationships, Smoking, a lot of snow, get ready for some sad gays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-04
Packaged: 2019-06-05 00:35:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15158570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abel_obel/pseuds/abel_obel
Summary: Something about the cold makes you better at noticing things.





	1. Chapter 1

If it was meant to be a preparatory breath, it would have lasted him longer. Perhaps he would have put up more of a successful fight before the eel-like fingers that slithered around his ankle had pulled him so far down below the frozen surface. Perhaps, even if it hadn’t given him strength, he could have fought longer, and that would have saved him. But it is only an impulsive, gasping gulp of air, and it doesn’t stop the dying man from dragging him down with him.

The cold waits a moment, until he is completely underwater before it hits him. And when it does, it tears his body, muscles rendered inoperable in a bloodless atrophy. Cold, like a knife slicing open every vein in him.

For being only a few degrees from frozen, the water moves fast, swallowing him up, flooding his eyes and ears and nose, choking that last shallow breath from the sergeant’s lungs as an explosion of bubbles that sneak out from his mouth. His lips split apart and his jaws slacks, as if to scream or chase back the oxygen as it streamlines to the surface, but the dam is broken and the water fills his mouth and throat. It takes him a moment to realize, but the water has different rules. Losing a breath doesn’t mean you can replace it with another, and you can only ever have what you brought down with you. The water doesn’t give.

The ticking realization of the lake water flooding irrevocably between his teeth springs a sharper dread through his bleary panic. He forces his eyes open, immediately feeling them freeze over, the nerves that link them to his brain rattling with frostbite, sucked dry as a brutal summer and begging to be closed. The cold that burrowed in him wrenches his insides to ice. He panics, chokes it out and shuts his mouth, swallowing what he can’t expel as it drowns his throat and stabs his lungs like a fireplace poker. Coughs convulse in his chest, trying to force the water from him, but he knows he has to keep his lips sealed if he doesn’t want this to be the last thing he feels.

Wide eyes search downward, catching on the sinking body beneath him, straining against the water’s weight and pumping blood out of the bullet wounds the sergeant had given him in his stomach. He’s a cinderblock cuffed to his ankle in a vice grip, pulling him down farther from light and life.

Thank God and biology for that human panic button, the automatic launch of fight-or-flight mode that numbs reason and horror alike, because the sergeant begins to kick. He kicks and flails, driving his free foot into the fist around his boot. But even with instinct in the driver’s seat, his energy fades much more quickly than he expected. Just after a few seconds of struggle, he can feel his fatigued body less yielding to his control, black, wriggling dots encroaching on the edges of his vision.

Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

If only he had taken one good breath before he fell in.

Now, he is about to die for such a stupid mistake.

The relentless grip on him has tightened, but the sergeant can no longer see the body responsible; it is too dark this close to the bottom. Even if he does manage to break free, he would suffocate before he could reach the surface.

Just hurry.

He strains himself, kicking like a madman in the delirious notion that he could still shake him off if every deliberate punch with the sole of his boot misses. But with the flurry of his motion and the resistance of the water mounting above him, the deafening pressure in the absence of breath implodes gradually in his head, twisting his lungs into taffy. Crushing him as if he is somehow thirty fathoms deep. It all suddenly gets more and more useless.

The last conscious thought on his mind is how much he wishes he could call for help. That is a sad last thought.

One final shove of his leg, and a small pop rattles the water, sending out a sonar wave of tiny bubbles from the head of the man beneath him. More blood swirls out from his nose, which was already misshaped and broken on land, and his grip loosens involuntarily, slips from his shoe.

God.

The sergeant swings an arm upward, starting to swim up to that too-bright light glistening behind the ice overhead. It fails him. His shoulder is powerless, any will to move drained from his body as the blood beneath his skin boils and burns. Without the chance of survival, there is no more adrenalin. Only fear.

Come on. Come on.

His chest and throat constrict, sealed tight to keep the water out.

Come on. Come on.

He kicks his legs and paddles, but they’re useless and burning and the surface stays  just as far away.

Come on.

With every nerve in his body on fire, it is hard to tell that the water is even cold anymore. The pressure of its weight crashes in on him, pushing the sides of his ribcage together with a blunt, undulating strength until they touch and pierce his lungs. Every organ and tendon in his body aches. Just one more breath, it pleads. Just one.

His mind has shrunk with darkness, and he forgets the rules of the water again.

He gasps. Inhaling a rush of water that invades his lungs in the smooth motion of pouring it from pitcher to glass, making him twitch and hiccup, fighting to cough it up. However successful he was, it is only replaced and replaced, trying to shovel sand into a bucket with a hole in it. The blackness eats away the dimming light above him like acid.

 

“Roach!”

Without a blind thought, his body springs itself toward the wide split in the ice that devoured the sergeant. The captain is no stranger to impulsive starts like this, emphatic explosions of sudden heroism, even in his periphery, and swipes out to seize the lieutenant. Feeling his hand close around the arm straining beneath layers of thick, standard-issue fabric is all the confirmation he needs to jerk him back in line, never once daring to draw his eyes from the line of soldiers dotting the opposite side of the rift in the ice, firing far too openly on them to be comfortable or insane enough to even stand fully.

“Negative, Ghost. There’s too many of them.”

The captain’s reprimand rings like the resonance of a blast in the lieutenant’s ears. The sharp crack of Sanderson’s head against the ice as he fell, which never seemed to stop since he saw him slip between the thick, frozen plates is suddenly shoved out, and the surrounding gunfire catches up with him. It sounds wrong, tinny, like it’s being played on a PA system at a supermarket. He can’t even remember the last time he went to a supermarket.

Across the ice, far away now, teetering on the edge of their rifles’ range, nearly invisible soldiers crouch out in the open, sometimes bucking and falling, struck with bullets. He’s peering through the scope of his gun, leaning into it like he was taught, like he had long since perfected, but is made of wax, finger lingering a hair from the trigger.

Sanderson doesn’t resurface.

Someone behind the lieutenant shouts, “There’s our exfil.”

Captain MacTavish releases his admonishing fist from the lieutenant’s sleeve, neglecting to return fire as he shoots a glance over his shoulder at the helicopter swinging in over the treetops. “Fall back. Exfil at our six.”

The captain is uncontestedly a born leader; his voice sounds right barking out orders, and such orders are like to be followed. The lieutenant is not a leader or a listener, but he’s good at his job. Sometimes being good at your job beats out the man telling you how to do it, and the captain recognized this, pulled him aside once and encouraged him to voice any doubts or diffidence he may have in his calls. He asked for vigilant surveillance, as any leader worth his salt.

So now, as the beating of metal rotors blows a dusting of snow across the slick ice, boots patting away until they are far enough behind him to seem quiet, he is giving him his vigilant surveillance. The lieutenant remains, watching through the scope, eyes darting every so often to the site where the sergeant had disappeared.

When the captain notices the absent space beside him, he skids to a stop and turns back. His voice cracks out over the several empty yards and echoes in his comm, “Ghost, what are you doing?”

He sounds tense, irritated, as he always does when things get sloppy. The lieutenant fires off a careful round and a white silhouette slumps, sliding a little as it hits the ice. “Roach, sir.”

The captain hardly lets him finish. “They’re arming SAMs, we haven’t got the time.”

His statement falls flat, like the thud of the dead bodies across from them.

The thought of a step back hesitantly trembles in the lieutenant’s muscles, but whatever system that had taken control of his mind overrides obedience. “Sorry, sir.”

His legs shoot him up and forward from where he had knelt, and he is running, gun gripped defenselessly across his chest, feet slipping an inch backward in each stride.

“Ghost?”

The scarred slit in the ice pulling wider between the two drifts grows closer with each lung-splitting course of his legs, and so does the Russians’ offensive line. But they are only blurs in the periphery of his focus.

“Ghost!”

His rifle clatters against the sleek ice, thrown with enough force to crack it if it weren’t but an inch thinner. A breath charging his lungs, he dives into the water cutting between the drifts. The sound of gunfire, a couple yards away and aimed at his easy target, is engulfed by the muted blanket of the lake.

“We can’t hold much longer, sir.”

The pilot’s voice is shouting back at him, with good reason. The captain is the last on the ice, spraying out a round of directionless cover fire to distract the Russians, scurrying around like ants at the lieutenant jumping into the water below. He is close enough to the open ramp of the helicopter that he could walk on and be done with it. But being a good leader is being a conscious leader. And the thing about conscience is that it can’t just let you do that. “Shit.”

“Sir!”

“Then go.” The captain slaps the iron side of the bird and beelines for the trees pressed against the lake before the pilot can even begin closing the ramp. But the pilot will leave, he doesn’t doubt that. People like her aren’t trained to ask questions. The men aren’t either, but he knows they’ll put up more of a fight. He hears someone shout after him, and he keeps running, gun at his hip, tapping out tight, percussive rounds.

The lacerating chill shaves the lieutenant’s senses to a point, his muscles straining against the dead weight of the water enveloping him. Each swift stroke of his arms cuts deeper into the lake, growing darker and thicker with sediment as his heart pounds out a countdown timer in his head. There is nothing on his mind but a name; the same name that shudders in the air drawn tight in his lungs.

_Roach._

The blood pumping in the captain’s ears as he sprints spits a different tune in time with his racketing pulse.

_Fuck._

He leaps into the thin cover of the unruly bushes and trees peppering the snow, dull and matted beneath their shade, noting he has just introduced it to the Russians’ repertoire to do the same. Taking the fight out of the open would only level the playing field, if not restore the Russians’ sizeable advantage, now that they have torn the odds back in their favor with an iron fist. A platoon of Russians, albeit dwindling, against three men. Maybe two. Most likely two.

MacTavish shakes the cynicism from his scattering mind and tethers it to the sight of the shrinking line of soldiers across the ice, firing blindly into the wooded bank, all trained on him.

Roach.

The body fades into the lieutenant’s view, as the darkness uncurls its tendrils from him, limb by limb. He can see that he’s floating downward, suspended weightlessly, hair wisping around his head like the grassy plants that sprout from the bottom of a river without a helmet to tame it. As if he is asleep in outer space. Are bodies supposed to sink like this?

The lieutenant grabs the sergeant’s wrist and fixes himself upward, lifting Sanderson’s pliant body with little resistance from the water, tucking a hand beneath each arm as he kicks. His heart is pounding harder than his lungs, and the tension grows and grows, winding the knot thicker, as the water above him sheds layer by layer. Then, his head breaks the surface. His body instinctively gasps for breath, sunlight pouring over him, eyes snapping open in the disorienting brightness, and the muzzle of a gun points itself at his head.

One skipped heartbeat, and the half-calculated survival instinct beating in his head tells him to swing. The Russian is slow enough that he can knock the rifle from his hand before his finger can find the trigger. But before the lieutenants hand has parted from the water, a splatter of red hurls itself from the side of the Russian’s head. The gun aimed at the lieutenant passes through dead fingers onto the edge of the ice.

“Ghost, over here!”

The captain’s lilt hits his ears like a mistake, like his comm is jumping radio waves. There is no helicopter, that much he had expected. Planned on, even. Bullets, he had ascertained. But Captain MacTavish is a surprise. For better or for worse, he doesn’t have the luxury of time to consider.

He pulls Sanderson from the clutches of the lake, throwing him onto the empty side of the crevice in an involuntary jerk. His hand grabs the Russian’s gun and hoists himself out onto the ice, gathering the back of Sanderson’s collar in his fist.

The air bites where the water has already claimed him, but it’s better left on his skin and not in his head. He darts to the wooded lakeshore, head down, dragging the limp body of the sergeant in one shaking hand, laying down bursts of cover fire with the other, blindly racing the enemies’ bullets to the captain’s voice. His body runs like a machine, friction in his joints fizzling with heat. Something jumps out and stings him in the leg, knocking him to a falter, but the adrenalin sweating into his bloodstream wipes it from his mind. He can hear them across the ice, their shouts brittle and hoarse in the thin, frigid air, and he doesn’t look back. It’s only a few more steps.

He breaks the treeline, and the sergeant’s body is instantly more resilient in the snow-drenched dirt. A few protective feet into the trees, the lieutenant hoists the sergeant up over his shoulder, protest hissing in his leg where the bullet had speared him. MacTavish’s footsteps shuffle up to him. “Great with the heroics there,” he mumbles between pants, words caustic and drifting out on the opaque clouds of his breath. “Come on. This way.”

He juts his head to signal over his shoulder and starts back deeper into the woods. The lieutenant follows.

His heart is still hammering in his ears, gelid beads dripping down his skin, freezing in his eyelashes. Sanderson was almost heavy on his shoulder, drenched with the weight of water and death and a leg shot through beneath him, the gun slung over his other shoulder knocking against his bones. He shifts the sergeant’s body and keeps going, running, as quickly as his body can and then faster.

The muffled shouting of a cyrillic tongue attacks the air behind them, echoing spurts of automatic gunfire; the captain fades a few footfalls behind, muttering, “Keep going. I’ve got our six.”

The water on his boots is turning to ice now, jammed between the chipped valleys of their soles, and it makes running dangerous, but he doesn’t stop. Legs pumping like iron pistons, they would run the lieutenant straight across Siberia. Wind burning their exposed skin, dodging tree trunks, bounding over logs and depressions, their footprints look like a battle, or a dance.

As they run and run and run, the low lying switches of petrified trees soon cease to whip their faces, the snapping leaves and twigs beneath their feet silenced, and the crunching of thick snow and labored breaths amplified outside the drumming woods. They are in the open, but it is silent, and they are alone.

The lieutenant’s legs wear themselves to a stop.

“Alright.” MacTavish’s feet stumble a few more steps behind him, coming down from the final sprint of a marathon. “Set him down.”

The lieutenant turns back to him and tugs his icy mask from his face, where his nose and cheeks had been burning pink beneath it. He doesn’t want to. He would rather keep running and never have to look at him again, never have to risk the confirmation that he is hauling around a corpse. But he’s good at his job, so he leans to let the sergeant slip gently from his shoulder, a hand behind his neck and at his back to soften the landing.

He lays him down in the snow. When the sergeant’s arms slide from his resting place on his shoulder, they thudd strengthlessly against the earth, like dead men’s arms do. His skin is no more alive than the snow and the same dull shade of white. His eyelashes gather flecks of ice against his cheeks, lips colorless and parted slack. His hair soaked three shades darker, beginning to freeze and cling to his forehead, limbs splayed out like the broken joints of a doll. He looks like a sickly child, a victim of typhoid or malaria, coated in a thick sheen of poison.

The lieutenant’s blood whispers the word to him before he allows his mind to think it.

“Roach?” On his knees beside him, leaning over the sergeant, his voice shakes with a desperate urgency. “Roach.”

He smacks his palm against the sergeant’s cheek, and it could have given him frostbite through his glove. Panic sets a fire in his stomach and lets him burn.

He laces his fingers together and forces his palms down into the sergeant’s still chest, between his top ribs, in a pulsing rhythm. One. Two. Three. Four.

“Roach?”

One. Two. Three. Four.

“Roach, wake up, mate.”

He rips off a glove and hold his palm out over his lips. He’s not breathing. The captain can see his hand shaking.

He pounds on his chest again. One. Two. Three. Four.

Nothing.

“Come on, Sanderson.”

The captain kneels at his side and watches with that grave expression on his face. They watch each other often, him and his lieutenant. They’ve unwittingly trained themselves to see everything, and they each know the other better than they know themselves. Knowing that MacTavish’s sighs and criticisms are more focused at the mirror than the men in front of him. Knowing that when the lieutenant asks you a question, you shouldn’t counter back so quickly, as he probably wants you to make sure you know the answer more than he does. Knowing that the less effort the lieutenant makes to convince you to agree with him, the more you should. Knowing that for every word the captain says, there are another thirty he doesn’t. That is the kind of knowing you need in places like this, where two or two hundred people could die depending on the way you say a word. The kind of knowing that comes from watching his lieutenant with tense hands and a low, growling voice trying to punch the life back into the dead man at his feet. The knowing that it’s too much.

“Ghost.”

One. Two. Three. Four.

“Ghost.” Sterner.

One. Two--

Something shudders inside the sergeant. His shoulders tense and his body crumples in at his stomach as if someone has plowed him there with a hammer, and he chokes. He folds over onto his side, throwing up water that lumps like rocks in his throat, curling in on himself.

The fear wound up in the lieutenant is levelled by a bomb, scattering with the dust. Sanderson weakly lifts himself from the snow on quaking hands as he hacks and wheezes into it.

“Roach.”

The sergeant catches a glimpse of the lieutenant over his shoulder, a look of groggy disorientation as he wipes his lips with the back of his hand and struggles to contain a few more wracking coughs that jerk his shoulders. “What?” His voice was dry and cracked, more of a pant than a word.

Before the sergeant can register where he is or who he’s talking to, the lieutenant pulls him violently into his embrace, nearly crushing the bones of the shivering body into his. He buries his face in his neck, though he’s wet and frozen, because he is wet and frozen too, gripping him with a desperate strength, locking out anything that would pry him away. So tightly, so close, he can feel his heartbeat.

Only he doesn’t.

He can feel the captain’s eyes on him, and the knowing with which he watches him.

Instead, he lays a heavy, gloveless hand on Sanderson’s snow-crested shoulder. The familiarity of the hand slowly sinks into him, sets a warmth in his lifeless body, pacifying the confusion that clouds everything within him. The sergeant’s eyes focus on him, then the snow, the open air around them, tearing himself from the throws of a nightmare. “Oh.” It was only a hoarse whisper, choked out between clattering teeth and hitched breath as his body succumbs to the cold.

The captain’s lips press into a firm line, eyes drifting down to the scars of their footprints in the snow. “We should get going,” he interjects, rising to his feet. “Good to have you back in the land of the living, Roach.”

Still pale and looking concerningly dead, Sanderson flashes a faint, unsustainable smile on trembling lips. “Don’t think you can get rid of me so easy, sir.”

The lieutenant remembers himself, remembers where they are. He helps the shaking sergeant to his feet, each of them gripping the other with both hands and stiff fistfuls of fabric.

MacTavish eyes the lieutenant wincing from the weight on his clipped leg and slings the rifle over his shoulder. “I’ve got Roach, you cover us.”

With Sanderson alive and crossfire escaped, the adrenalin is draining from the lieutenant and leaving him unprotected from the cold latticing on his skin and the venom of the bullet in his thigh. He would have probably suffered through it if the captain hadn’t spoken. But for each word said, there are thirty thought, and those thirty knew something the lieutenant didn’t.

He keeps a hand pressed on the sergeant’s back as MacTavish pulls his arm over his shoulders, taking some of his weight off his laboring bones. The lieutenant returns the glove to his hand, already bruising with cold under his fingernails, and reloads the gun at his hip. Something falls in the woods and the trees jostle in the wind, and he wonders how long he’s allowed to stand here, waiting until his pulse quiets and he can be a soldier again.

The captain steals a final, wary look back and cuts his time short. He falls in before the captain, and the three men start up the soft incline leading from the woods.


	2. Chapter 2

They walk. 

They walk as if crossing a desert, heads cast downward to avoid the wind that blurs their eyes and licks at their frost-reddening cheeks. Sanderson cracks a joke when he finds the strength, but it doesn’t hide how weak he is, finding himself falling into the captain and dragging his feet. A cold sweat breaks out on MacTavish, or maybe it’s the snow melting from his brow, constantly pulling the sergeant up as his grasp on him slips, brushing off the whispers of insensation that tugged him down. The lieutenant’s leg is growing sorer and sorer with each sinking step. 

He thinks it could be funny, how trekking aimlessly through the sub-freezing wilderness makes you feel like your insides are set ablaze, constantly doused to ashes by each stabbing breath, and yet the fire roars back to life. Ironic, at the least. 

The shivering doesn’t stop. His little dip in the lake is really taking its toll now, pushing him to keep walking despite pain and exhaustion for his sheer requisite for missing body heat. 

“Think they’ll send recon?” 

A question the captain needs to know the answer to more than the lieutenant. He answers accordingly. “I can’t say.” 

Crossing the bland, lifeless snowfield, the captain’s heart still strikes against his ribs, forced to beat faster from that sterile chill that raws his throat with each inhale. They aren’t out of the woods yet. The Russians have probably given up, trusted their vicious land to prey on them instead, but holding Sanderson against him, he can hear his teeth chatter and the exhales of breathy whimpers when he stumbles against him. His uniform is properly frozen through now, his body fragile and cased in ice. He half-staggers, half-drags him like a lame, four-legged creature, earning uneasy glances from the lieutenant over his shoulder. Mactavish only swats him away with a refusal of acknowledgement. 

When they reach a steep ridge of snow, holding the sergeant on his feet with both arms and all of his strength, he gives the lieutenant that tired, earnest look. “We need to stop.” 

The lieutenant, exhausted, shivering: “I know.” 

The captain eases Sanderson down at the base of the hill, the latter growing less and less viable by the second. MacTavish sits beside him, keeping him close, smacking him on the cheek as his eyelids gain an unconquerable heaviness and flutter closed. “Hey, stay awake, mate.” 

The lieutenant watches his chest heave with shallow, painful breaths, shivering with a gut-wrenching violence. His eyes pull themselves to focus on the top of the hill. “Wait here.” 

Sanderson winces. “Not going anywhere.” 

He wades knee-deep in the snow as far up the slope as he can, then crawls the rest of the way, shovelling a grip of snow into his hands, digging in his toes, and pulling himself up, the way his brother taught him to climb trees when they were children. The bullet hole is searing through his muscles, demanding attention every time he moves, which he denies. He labors quickly and effortfully, panting out breath that could melt snow, all-too-conscious that the clock is beating him. All they need is a place to rest. Just a place to rest. 

As he pulls himself onto the rounded peak of the hill, the setting sun pokes up its head and casts a golden haze that skips across the untouched snow of the valley below, as if igniting the peaceful wakes of a white ocean down a column of light. The valley is flat, woods edging around a wide, barren clearing. Barren but for a dark, decrepit cabin near the trees. 

The lieutenant releases a breath, and with it a heap of worry that courses out of his veins and dies in the biting air. It is undeniably old, looks of ash, roof buckling under a layer of snow, and will hardly provide any insulation from the harsh winter, but it is shelter. It will do. 

Without a second thought, he turns and slips cautiously back down the hill, where Sanderson has curled in on himself and MacTavish studies the lieutenant doubtfully. “Is it clear?”

“Come on.” He reaches for the front of the sergeant’s tactical vest and pulls him up. 

“Ghost, we can’t go on much further like this.” 

The lieutenant leans the sergeant against him, one arm holding his over his shoulder, the other around his waist. “We don’t have to.” 

 

The cabin is deserted. The captain lowers his gun as the lieutenant ambles in behind him and hurriedly sets the sergeant down against the hearth. Making it up the hill and down the other side had taken too great a toll on him, and his eyes are hardly open for a second at a time, clenched shut in a gritting agony, the same as his jaw. “Stay with me, bug. Stay with me.” The lieutenant’s hands are shaking, unsure, holding the tense body wracking with shivers in front of him. 

The lieutenant is good at hiding his distress, but MacTavish is good at looking for it. He shoulders his gun and searches his zip pocket for his lighter. “Ghost, I’ve got this. See if you can find anything upstairs.” 

He reluctantly draws away from the sergeant with a murmured, “Sir.” 

The sergeant moves to speak, tries to reach out a hand to him as he parts, but the lieutenant turns, replaced by the tall shadow of the captain at his side, gathering the dry grass abandoned in the fireplace and snapping a spark from his lighter. “You’re alright, mate.” 

Above them, the thin floorboards creak as the lieutenant shuffles around, and the fire between the captain’s fingers spits a small stream of smoke on a blade of grass. The straw fizzes and a thin, weak flame dances on the hearth. The lighter is clicked closed and he cups his hands around the flickering light, blowing a soft breath into it that gives it the might to spread and crackle. 

Sanderson, propped up against the ashy brick of the hearth, turns gingerly toward the fire. “Cozy.” 

Footsteps scuffle down the wooden stairs, and the lieutenant comes to the fireside, sheets of fabric strewn messily over his arm. “This isn’t going to last,” the captain says, pushing the burning straw closer to the edge of the hearth. “You keep him warm. I’m going to see if I can find something that’ll burn.” He stands and rubs his hands together, skin beginning to itch in the foreign presence of heat. “Anything upstairs?” 

“Hardly.” The lieutenant drops the sheets and kneels beside Sanderson, unlaces his boots and tugs as gently as he can, but they’re frozen to his socks. “You don’t think anyone’s coming.” It isn’t much of a question, only an observation that he knows MacTavish won’t refute. 

The captain watches. “Keep him alive, Ghost.” 

The lieutenant doesn’t respond, and the captain parts for the door as he begins undoing the sergeant’s vest. He takes off his own gloves, then, fingers jittering and burning with the cold touch, he unzips the sergeant’s jacket. 

Sanderson gives a weak laugh, halfway between a gasp and a hitch of his breath. “At least buy me dinner first.” 

The lieutenant allows an airy chuckle to pass his lips, but it isn’t long before a cough tears open the sergeant’s chest, hunching him over and casting a lacing frailty over him. 

He holds a hand at the base of Sanderson’s neck, tugging the snow-stiff jacket from his acquiescent frame, as he recovers from the spell. There’s a taste of metal on his tongue.

“It’s alright, bug.” 

Leaning him back, he runs an absent hand through the sergeant’s wet hair. That is something he hasn’t done in a long time, and it makes Sanderson think he’s dying. Maybe this is a second chance to have a better last thought. 

The lieutenant grabs a quilt from the pile he had salvaged from the dusty attic and wraps it around the sergeant, taking him in his arms and clutching his shivering frame against him. The breath that he sputters out against the lieutenant’s neck still leaves a delicate cloud in the air, but it is far too cold to come from a living thing. He runs the palm of his hand against him back. Friction is the last available source of heat, and he’s desperate. 

“Simon?”

The word rakes itself up from Sanderson’s lungs, clawing at his throat and unfurling from his bruising lips as a plea for mercy. 

“Don’t talk. You’re alright.” 

His breath is too short, too erratic. He’s too cold. He’s shaking so badly he could break himself. He’s dying out against him like a dim light bulb. “You didn’t have to jump in.” 

The lieutenant rests his chin on his head, closing his eyes, fingers still tangling in his hair. 

He is a professional. He has always been professional. He is good at his job, and his job requires composure, protocol, and indifference. Compassion is MacTavish’s duty, and the lieutenant’s is every heartless thing that isn’t. In a way he has to give some credit to his nature, and the way that nature made him, every excruciating hour that carved in him all the compromising things a good leader like the captain doesn’t want to be. When MacTavish first met him, he managed to call him a psycho and a keeper in the same thought. He was a  _ keeper _ because he was a  _ psycho _ . The guys can joke all day about how he must have killed puppies when he was a kid to get the way he is, microwaved a fucking hamster. Being that way is what makes him so good at his job. 

That doesn’t make it any less ugly. 

He keeps it rotting in his closet with the lights off and the door locked. Every few weeks he gives an offering of unceremonial commendation. After a day of doing things people are expected to regret, when the others go back to shower or sit on the floor for an hour to remember that it’s real, he gives his penance in a cigarette to the blight rotting in his core.  _ Thanks for ruining me to keep me alive this long. _

One night in the clammy little rec room with little more than a beer cooler and a pool table, they all sat around saying offensive things because everyone was too drunk to think or get their feelings hurt. The lieutenant counted himself out, sat on the barstool with his shoulder turned to the rest of them, picking off the label of his beer bottle between sips. He never likes getting drunk; it reminds him too much of his father, but sometimes he has to. 

Side conversations sprouted out of whatever game they were playing and everyone sounded the same, everyone laughed the same, everyone held a pool stick and leaned over the table the same. Everyone was smiling and sweating and squinting to see each other beneath the streaks of the naked bulbs. The lieutenant never realized that personalities were standard issue, too. 

Sanderson was trying to teach some guy a trick shot on the table, how to hit the cue so it would jump the ball in front of it. Once he got the hang of it, the sergeant smacked him on the shoulder with an encouraging flash of teeth, and waded out of the ichor and the afterglow, lingering over to the lieutenant’s silent little corner. 

The sergeant leaned back against the stool beside him, crossed one foot over the other, a million dollar smile on his face. “Not much of a talker, are you?” 

He’s drunk; he could smell the alcohol curdling on him. The lieutenant kept peeling the thin plastic from the glass. No, he hadn’t talked much, not to Sanderson, anyway. He had talked  _ about _ him, once, to the captain over a cigar, after watching him run one morning, before there was a war they had to be fighting. The sergeant had kept an average pace, falling in with the others as they rounded the track, arms bent at the elbows like a boxer had taught him how, cheeks streaked red like an apple, a small smile of focus on his face. Every so often, his tongue would dart out and run across his bottom lip, never losing that smile. 

MacTavish, not paying his new lieutenant too much attention: “Oh, that’s Sanderson. He’s a funny little guy. Reminds me of myself when I was new.” 

The lieutenant took a puff from his cigar, letting the taste of it bitter the words on his tongue. “He looks like he’s gonna get himself killed.” 

The captain gave a half-hearted chuckled. “Come on. We were all young once.” 

Now, he figured he would have to talk to him if he didn’t want him staring at him with that smile on his face, the dirty, tawney lights of the rec room carving out the shadows of his dimpled cheeks. “I suppose I don’t,” he took a sip from the bottle, still cold, still waxen and flat. He added, “Around this many people, at least.” 

The sergeant stole a glimpse of the room, breathing in the energy, before turning back to the lieutenant and leaning in closer to him. “You don’t have to be so uptight,” he murmured like a secret, cut dangerously by his teeth. “Even the captain’s having fun.” 

Sanderson punctuated his thought with a chug of his beer, the glass sweating clear, crystal beads down the skin of his knuckles. When he stopped drinking, he touched the edge of the bottle mouth to his bottom lip and whistled over it, catching a deep, airy sound that resonated in the glass and made ripples in the beer. 

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “Impressive.” 

That made the sergeant laugh like a gunshot, and it started the same strange half-foreign, half-familiar feeling in his chest that put him on edge. That feeling made him smarter, made him see clearer, made him wonder what he was doing. 

That night, Sanderson came by the lieutenant’s room and leaned against his nightstand, smoking a cigarette out his window. He was always leaning against things, like it somehow made him cool with all his average height, average build, and average attractiveness. 

“Well, no roommate, but it’s tiny,” he observed, bending over the nightstand to blow a curl of pale smoke out the opening of the window. He pulled his head back in and stared at the lieutenant. “You don’t talk much around any number of people.” 

The lieutenant, laid out on his bed with a book propped up on his chest, didn’t spare the sergeant a glance. “Maybe you’re just not the right person.” 

That brought a flattered grin to his lips and he dropped the burning cigarette into the mug stolen from the mess hall with the rest of the ashes. Curious eyes fall on the lieutenant, working him over in an unspeaking, unwavering gaze. A moment of silence in the dim, grimy lamplight before the sergeant said, “What’s that?” 

The lieutenant almost laughs, says, “It’s a book,” with a certain sardonicism and lack of sympathy for an addled drunk, but upon looking up at him, he saw Sanderson’s eyes dark beneath a furrowed brow, staring at the patchy stains on the lieutenant’s forearm. 

He glanced at them, scattered across his skin, but fading. “Cigarette burns.” 

A muscle in the sergeant’s face twitched. “From who?”

“My father.” 

“Oh.” 

The sergeant closed the space between them with a few uncertain steps, sitting on the bed beside the lieutenants head. He picked up his wrist, raised his arm to him and pressed his lips softly to the rough flesh of the scar. If he was drunk enough to kiss a cigarette burn, the lieutenant was drunk enough to thumb his lips apart and put his fingers in the sergeant’s mouth. 

Sanderson tasted sour. He was like the cigarette dropped in a half-drinken whiskey bottle, cooked under low lights and passed around in sticky palms. He tasted like the cherry-flavored gum he was always chewing and spearmint toothpaste. He also tasted like the first person the lieutenant had ever opened up that dark, locked part of himself to, and that made him taste like home. Real home. The kind that regular people with regular lives always talk about, not the house he was raised in. Sanderson was everything but the house he was raised in. 

But his job requires indifference. Growing up as he did made him good at that job. The sergeant made him very bad at it. 

And the captain knows. The same way he always knows.

 

If the sun was setting when the three men had stumbled into the cabin, it was twilight when MacTavish returned with two armfuls of dry sticks and branches, and by nightfall, the sergeant still hasn’t woken up, wrapped in linen sheets and quilts, leaned against the lieutenant in the warmth of the fire. The captain sits across from them, knees drawn up and rifle across his lap, firelight licking dangerously in the eyes that watch the lieutenant. The knowing watch. “You should get some rest yourself, Ghost.” 

He stirs. “I’m fine.” 

The captain’s sight floats down to his hands for only a moment, before one of them reaches to his neck and switches off his comm. Out here, that gesture is almost a threat. “There’s something I need to ask you.” 

Without his voice, there is a sudden, deadly silence in the air, crackling in the fire and whistling in on the night wind. The lieutenant takes his cue to do the same. His mind goes stiff.

MacTavish sighs. “I know you, Ghost. I’ve known you for years.” He eyes the sergeant, whose breathing has calmed in his sleep, yet his face is still twisted with a soft expression of just-recognizable pain. “You’ve never been one to care so much.” 

The lieutenant’s blood halts in his veins. His body now conducted by a distinctly unmalleable dread. “What, sir?”

The captain blinks. “You and Sanderson.” 

It is all he needs to say for the lieutenant’s silhouette to go rigid against the firelight. And that is all MacTavish needs to see for an answer. 

There’s an incriminating dryness in the lieutenant’s mouth, and he swallows, futilely trying to wash it down. “Sir?”

A heavy, knowing quiet. One of the only types of quiet able to be shared between them. Whatever emotion the captain doesn’t want to see on the lieutenant’s face is ignored in favor of spectating the fire eating away at the tree branches in the hearth, stripping them down to glowing embers. “Be careful, mate.” There is a foul warning in his words, one that wants both to protect him and for him to not need protecting. “Don’t do anything stupid. I can promise you no one else will be so blind or forgiving.” 

A thousand horrible words race through the lieutenant’s head, but he remains compliant. “Yes, sir.” 

MacTavish switches his comm back on and lies back with a weary groan. “Well, if you’re not going to sleep, then I will.” He examines his wristwatch briefly, before folding his arm behind his head. “Wake me when you get tired.” 

The lieutenant’s eyes open the next morning to a dwindling fire and the captain standing by one of the blown-out windows, white sunlight shining through on him, talking to himself. 

No, not to himself, to the tinny voice over the comm. 

The lieutenant wipes his eyes and the urgency building in his bones prompts him to shake the sergeant sleeping against him. His lips are blue, and he is impossibly still, but his eyes flutter open. “What?” He croaks, sleep afflicting his throat with sandpaper. 

A hearty, Russian drawl scratches over MacTavish’s comm one last time before clicking off. 

“What was that?” The lieutenant asks, blinking away the harsh morning light that scatters in patches on the floor, raining in from open windows, from the cracks in the walls and around the door. Like those searchlights the lieutenant has come to acquaint with the stream of flesh-ripping bullets that typically follows.

The captain sighs, monitoring something far-off and unseeable out the window. “Nikolai. Caught wind of our situation and he’s headed this way.” He considers the pair in front of the fireplace with a chastising malevolence. “Let’s hope the second time’s the charm.” 

Sanderson sits up and shakes the sheets from his shoulders, feeling a pang of humility blanket him instead. “Sorry, sir.” 

“Not you, Roach. It’s a good thing you shot that ice. If the idiot who saved you had just decided to be an idiot a little sooner, we would have made it.” 

This cracks a smile on the sergeant’s face as he takes his jacket from its drying place at the edge of the hearth and slips it on, moving slowly and with a residual weakness from the day before, but he seems better. He seems farther from death. 

Outside, birds twitter in the trees, sending shrill responses to their friends and lovers miles away. Sticks snap from phantom weight and fall to the ground, buried beneath that afternoon’s snowfall. If the air didn’t bite you, if the land weren’t so cruel and crawling with pain, the captain thinks it could remind him of home.

 

In that same conversation he had with the lieutenant, over a cigar, before they had a war to fight, MacTavish told him that Sanderson was like a firecracker. He knew things, he was competent, sometimes he was damn good, but sometimes he was useless and sloppy and dwelled too much on the feeling in his gut. You never knew what you were going to get. Every time you see him, it’s like opening a party popper on New Year’s. 

The lieutenant kept his eyes down, firefly ashes peeling back another layer of the cigar to a fine rubble as it idled in his hand. He repeated himself, lower, and his lips didn’t have to move so much to speak it. “He’s gonna get himself killed.” 

A cigar in the captain’s hand had never been a solemn thing, so that night he never had a solemn smile. Only rich, toothy grins like those that children learned to make from cartoons and picture books. He put one on and gave the lieutenant’s shoulder a mannish shove with his own. “Or us.” 

It was too early on in their knowing each other for them to really learn  _ how _ to know, but MacTavish had picked up enough already to only half expect the lieutenant to laugh. The other half of him was right. 

The lieutenant let it crumble to silence, and the captain soaked his words back up. They stung him with how grim they felt now, shattered on the floor after the lieutenant refused to catch them. He took another drag to forget. 

He knew he would have to keep an eye on the lieutenant. A man like him was dangerous in the opposite way that Sanderson was. Instead of swinging back and forth with an erratic volatility, he was constant. He was constant to a fault, and the mounting pressure of a changing world would only bear him farther down that unwavering path and make him something worse. Something predictable, but worse. He was an interminable barrage of punches, aim fixed steady at your face, blinding and bloodying you over and over. The second his fist draws back you know exactly where he’s going to hit, because it’s the same spot he’s always hit; it just hits deeper. 

The captain mused that they were perfect for each other. Sanderson with his loose cannon mind and his tendency to do the right thing and the wrong thing at the same time while intending neither. The lieutenant with his destructive inability to fight his nature. The lieutenant standing still with the sergeant running wild circles around him could throw off the stasis of the earth and initiate an existential risk. 

The captain flicked the ashes from the end of his cigar. “Maybe,” he saw the two of them, and they were perfect for each other, and they would ruin each other. “Maybe he’ll just be the death of you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. I replayed the entire campaign in one sitting for nostalgia's sake and was feeling inspired.


End file.
